Can you tell a compelling story in 500 words or less? While it sounds challenging, the writers who appear in Cheap Pop do so quite masterfully.

Cheap Pop is an online literary magazine that accepts microfiction, in other words anything 500 words or fewer. They will accept creative nonfiction but not poetry. And they post two stories a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, or roughly eight a month (although, the most recent content on their site currently is from the month of July).

The first July story, “Tin Town,” by Natalie Lund, draws from the political landscape that we were in leading up to Trump’s election. Immigrants live in boxes in tin towns, representing their transience, and possibly, their need to move quickly and their inability to firmly plant roots into the ground here amongst Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and our own uncertainty regarding what his policies may be or become. The children of tin towns love hearing stories of their parents' home places, but their parents delay visiting, somberly thinking, “It’s easier to leave, we’ve learned, if you believe you can always go back.”

“Guernica,” a single-paragraph piece by Russell Brakefield, shows a glimpse of a love scene between a man and a bombmaker’s granddaughter. She sees beauty in her grandfather, sees his life as an inspiration, the way Picasso made Guernica, an artistic masterpiece, or beauty, out of the destruction of a small, peaceful town.

Jenn Stroud Rossman’s “The Disaster Specialist” impressed me with the amount of character development that occurred in so little space. The players are Frank MacLorin, who has spent his life severely dedicated to his job as a reporter – or a “disaster specialist.” He’s the reporter on the ground in dangerous, windy, snowy, flooding areas who puts the story before himself. Second you have Dennis Charles, your media mogul, who cares more for the money flowing in from advertisers than for what he puts on the air between them. And finally Teresa, a girl presumably without the illustrious career of MacLorin or the money of Charles or perhaps she would’ve gotten a last name, who wants the attention of both (or either?), but she can’t seem to tear them away from the screen. Whether Rossman knew the likes of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria were coming, I don’t know, but I could picture MacLorin on the ground, interviewing newly homeless, while Charles and Teresa screwed with the news coverage turned off.

If you’ve seen or read Gone Girl, you’d appreciate Becca Yenser’s “Bang the Dream,” as it seems she’s channeling, or channeled, protagonist Amy’s “cool girl,” trying to pass for the “woman who pats the heads of children, begins a knitting project bigger than a headband, owns nice bras,” but no longer is up for playing the part. But rather than ratcheting into a psychothriller, Yenser’s piece becomes one about a relationship unraveling as the woman fails to become who she wants – or merely promised? – to be, and the man realized the woman he thought he was sleeping with was only an idealized version.

Anna O’Brien gets at a theme we try over and over to write accurately in “Rhymes with Orange”: aging. She's nicely married fond memories of a younger version of the woman and her mother who appears to be succumbing to dementia with a plain description of the vacancy that’s becoming the woman’s life and mind.

And finally, I’d like to note that, while the July contributors are mostly published lit mag pros, I enjoyed seeing a professor of mechanical engineering and a veterinarian among the published, and I can’t help but attribute the breadth of the stories and styles to the different mindsets the writers might come from.